News Archive

Teva’s new CEO, Kåre Schultz, has now been in place for just over three months, and at the end of last year, he laid out his plans to deal with Teva’s immediate problems of excessive debt and sliding profitability. The main highlight was massive…

Things appear to be going from bad to worse at Teva, which is giving the strong impression of being in meltdown. One can only hope that the recent Q2 results, which featured an eye-watering $6.1bn write-down of the company’s recently-acquired Actavis generics assets, mark…

According to the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, grief has five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although the development of biosimilars should not be an inherently grief-stricken business, it nevertheless appears to be closely following this path, certainly from the perspective of the…

The UK generics industry has been waiting for over a year to find out what the CMA’s final decision would be on the Pfizer/Flynn phenytoin case, following its preliminary ruling in August 2015 that the two companies were guilty of abuse of a dominant…

The news earlier this week that Siggi Olafsson is leaving Teva, to be succeeded by Dipankar Bhattacharjee (currently head of Teva Generics Europe) comes as something of a surprise, to say the least. As the architect of Teva’s long drawn-out purchase of Allergan’s generics…

At its May ‘Meet the management’ event in Basel, Sandoz was represented by Richard Francis, the MD of the business unit, Peter Goldschmidt, the regional manager for the US and Carol Lynch, head of the biosimilars business. According to Mr Francis, the choice of…

The announcement today that Hartmut Retzlaff has stepped down as CEO of Stada ‘due to a serious long-term illness’ comes as something of a surprise, but the reasons are not hard to discern. For weeks, activist investors in the form of a group called…

Mylan’s announcement last month that it has agreed to buy Meda for $9.9bn was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm by the stock market, which marked the company’s shares down 18% the following day. This was a reversal from the recent norm in…

Teva’s announcement last year that it was to acquire Allergan’s generic assets (‘Actavis’), came as a total surprise to the market. All the more so since Teva was, at the time, in hot pursuit of Mylan. It was particularly startling news in the UK,…

For us, the big headline from sanofi’s recent ‘meet the management’ day in Paris was the company’s announcement that it was reviewing the future of its European generics operation. This is as a consequence of the strategic review that has resulted in the creation…